Andrew Betts

Time to leave Kaya MJ behind us. Artur arrives at about 6:30am with the Land Rover and we load ourselves in for the journey to Maputo. Nick is in the back with Artur’s wife and daughter, and I’m in the front. The weather is bright and sunny, and the car quickly gets hot and stuffy. We start by going to Barra Lodge to see if they have my sunglassses, which I lost on the ocean safari yesterday (they don’t), and then on to Inhambane to fill up with fuel (an exorbitant 2100 meticals - about £65) and pick up Artur’s luggage from his house. By the time we’ve done all that it’s already 9:30am and we haven’t even left Inhambane yet.

Once we get on the highway, progress is much faster, and we’re soon passing senic landscapes and amazing coastlines as we drive south along the coast road. I move into the back, since the Land Rover’s heater seems to be on full blast with no way of turning it off, and as a result the passenger footwell is hot enough to be painfully uncomfortable.

Towards the end of the 450km journey, the car starts making a hissing noise. Artur stops and fiddles with the engine for a while, and declares that there is something broken which will cause us to use more fuel than we should, but that we can carry on.

Arriving in Maputo, the city seems overflowing with practically everything: people, cars, rubbish, etc. Artur drops us off at our hotel, and we discover that the price Nick was quoted on the phone is per-person, rather than per-room, as we had expected. We take it anyway as there is little choice at this point, and set off to explore the town.

A short walk brings us to the docks, with rows of locals fishing directly off the embankment, and a car ferry slowly turning in the bay, ready to disgorge it’s cargo of cars onto a suspiciously narrow pier. We walk along the dockside until we get to ‘Robert Mugabe square’, which is little more than a traffic junction, but certainly a sign of the scheme Mozambians seem fond of for street naming.

We climb up through the _____, an overgrown area of ‘park’ in the centre of the city, probably once an oasis in the middle of the city - Maputo’s Hyde park perhaps - but now the unofficial city landfill site. At the top is the Hotel Cardoso, which Paul recommended (but was a bit out of our price range), and next to it, the Natural History Muesum (currently closed).

Walking down towards the East side of the city and the beach, we arrive at a restaurant/bar district. Dinner is piri piri chicken at a small cafe. We look around the Polana shopping mall, a modern retail complex where we get some water, moan about the prices of pretty much everything, and are amused by a bookshop that has a window display consisting of several dozen books all of which are either about food or pediatric urology.

Just down the road from the shopping centre we come across a trendy bar that has comfy sofas, and have a few interestingly named smoothies while the proprietor explains that the place only opened yesterday and the wifi advertised in the menu isn’t online yet. I have a ‘Naked Baby’ (banana and strawberry smoothie).